VGP – Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Friday clarified social issues relating to preferential policies for people with meritorious services to the country, support for poverty reduction, job creation and human resource development.

Photo: VGP

Deputy PM Phuc affirmed that the State always attaches importance to preferential policies for people with meritorious services to the country, considering it a top priority of social welfare.

Of the total 8.8 million people with meritorious services to the country, nearly 1.4 million receive monthly allowances, he added. The Government has issued Decree 47/2012/ND-CP to raise allowance levels for these people.

Regarding poverty reduction assistance, he said local authorities have promoted large-scale investment in poverty reduction and production assistance, particularly for ethnic people.

The Government sets to focus on effectively realizing social welfare policies like the Resolution 80/NQ-CP on sustainable poverty reduction orientation and Resolution 30a/2008/NQ-CP on supporting rapid and sustainable poverty reduction in poorest districts, and the National Target Program on poverty reduction in the 2012 – 2015 period.

The Government targets to cut the number of poor households by 2% and the number of poor districts by 4% this year.

For job generation, some 612,000 jobs were created in the first five months in the wake of shrinking labor demand, accounting for 38.2% of the whole year’s plan. Thus, the target of creating some 1.6 million jobs this year needs stronger efforts.

The Government also planned to provide vocational training for 600,000 rural laborers while expanding investment to improve vocational training capacity.

In terms of human resource development, it is identified as a strategic breakthrough to meet the requirement of economic restructuring and growth model transformation.

A number of policies have been adopted to upgrade the quality of education but the quality of the workforce still remains low. The rate of untrained labor stood at 60%.

To address the problem, the Government approved the Strategy for human resource development and another Strategy for vocational training development in order to raise the rate of trained workforce to 55% by 2015 and 70% by 2020.